Analysts and Apple enthusiasts spent much of this early afternoon drooling over the new features and updates Apple announced today at its Worldwide Developers Conference keynote address. But while Apple fanboys and stock owners beamed at Retina displays, another group likely found themselves frowning: employees (and shareholders) of companies like Garmin and Google. That’s because one of Apple’s big announcements revealed a completely homegrown Maps program, including local search, flyover imagery and turn-by-turn directions.
Apple’s Maps is a direct shot across the bow at its biggest competitor, Google, which has dominated the map space in recent years. Although Apple doesn’t seem to have a corollary to Google’s StreetView feature – a powerful and labor-intensive feature, to be sure – Apple’s Scott Forstall revealed a number of features which will immediately make Apple a force in the world of maps. Yelp integration. Real-time traffic updates. A local search-enabled database of over 100 million businesses. Turn-by-turn directions. And to top it off, the launch of Apple Maps means Google will no longer be the default map provider to hundreds of millions of iPhone users.
Google, of course, is a gigantic company that will be able to withstand this blow from Apple. More threatened are companies like Garmin and TomTom, which have made their name producing high-quality GPS navigation and communications systems for cars.
Along with Maps, Apple today announced partnerships with car companies BMW, GM, Mercedes, Land Rover, Jaguar, Audi, Toyota, Chysler and Honda – partnerships that will include, within a year or so, steering wheel buttons that will summon Apple’s virtual assistant, Siri. Imagine: Instead of plugging an address into a Garmin GPS, drivers will be able to press a button and say “Siri, take me to Grandma’s house,” and have their iPhone give them turn-by-turn directions over the river and through the woods.
Not surprisingly, Garmin’s stock has dropped over 8% since the announcement. TeleNav, a company that focuses on voice-guided navigation on smartphones, has dropped 7.8%. TomTom, a smaller company, is down 2.7%. Google itself has fallen 2.3%, taking a precipitous dive at 2:45, exactly when the announcement was made. No coincidence there.
Apple’s entrance into mapping has been widely assumed to be forthcoming since the tech giant acquired C3 Technologies in October of last year, adding to its previous acquisitions of two other mapping companies – Placebase and Poly9 – since 2009. It seemed to be a matter of time until Apple took a shot at disrupting the mapping and navigation space. That time is now. Pardon the pun, but Apple is on the map.
Update: The original post incorrectly characterized action in the stock of GlobalStar, a mobile satellite device maker, as being related to Apple's announcement. The movement in GlobalStar's stock was caused by other news, not Apple's Keynote. This post has been updated to reflect that.
